Leaving for Good
“Captain Dickinson, who got killed there, said to me a year ago, when he was down here attending to the census, ‘Fortune, you could go back to Jackson County and live if you would; you would not be hurt.” I said, “Could I go back there and be a free man as I was when I was there before; to use freedom of speech and act in politics as any man would want with his own people—will I be safe to do that?” He said, “No, you will not; you will have to abandon that if you go back.”
-- Emanuel Fortune, Klan Hearings 1871
In the midst of the violence, Emanuel Fortune made the decision to move his family from the violent surroundings to a safer place. He moved his wife and young children to Jacksonville, Florida, and he lived in Tallahassee while he continued to represent Jackson County in the state legislature. Eventually, he, too, returned to live with his family in Jacksonville, but he never returned to Jackson County.
By Spring of 1871, Regulators were again targeting Republicans, but the murder of John Q. Dickinson in April signaled the defeat of its powerful politicians. Back in Jackson County, the political tide once again shifted. White Democrats gained a foothold in local and state politics. Even after all of the attempts to secure an interracial political coalition, Republican rule faded into obscurity in the face of violence. By the end of 1871, eleven people had been murdered due to their direct involvement in or relationship with Republican politics. Dr. John Finlayson, Wyatt Young and Stewart Livingston, Maggie McClellan, Oscar Granberry, Matt, Mariah, and their son, Matt Nickels, Calvin Rogers, Samuel Fleishman, and John Q. Dickinson were all murdered in the battle for Reconstruction. Men like Emanuel Fortune, William J. Purman, Charles Hamilton, and Joseph Nelson were forced to leave their homes because of their political involvement.
In November of 1871, Emanuel Fortune testified before a federal court as a part of the Klan Hearings. For five separate terms, Fortune had represented Jackson County in the state legislature. At the time of the Klan Hearings, he was living in Jacksonville, Florida. He had relocated from Jackson County, Florida, because of violent threats from white Democrats. He was one of many individuals who were forced to leave their homes in Jackson County because of the violence there testifying about the violence of Reconstruction in Jackson County.
Emanuel Fortune had worked hard to gain a place in the Florida House of Representatives. Though formerly enslaved, he sat as a representative for Jackson County in the Florida State Legislature, and he would go on to be active in the politics of Jacksonville. These momentous successes did not come without difficulty. Though representing both the Republican party of his fellow freedmen and the Democratic whites, Fortune faced great hostility from the white Democratic leaders in the county. He testified that white men had commented with statements such as, “The damned republican party has put niggers to rule us and we will not suffer it;” “Intelligence shall rule the country instead of the majority;’ and all such as that.” And as Emanuel Fortune also noted when he testified in front of the Congressional Klan Hearings, white Democrats declared, this was a “white man’s government,” and “the colored men had no right that white men were bound to respect.”
This page has paths:
- Introduction: Understanding Jackson County, Florida, from 1865-1871 Annemarie Nichols